Islands and a chiefly order
Fiji was settled some 3,000 years ago by the Lapita people, seafarers whose distinctive pottery marks the Austronesian expansion across the Pacific, and later by further Melanesian and Polynesian migration. Fijian society developed around powerful chiefs, elaborate custom and, in the accounts of early Europeans, warfare fierce enough to earn the group the name the Cannibal Isles.
In 1874 the paramount chief Cakobau ceded Fiji to Britain, and it became a Crown colony. The British ruled in part through the chiefly system, and set aside most land as inalienable Indigenous property — a settlement whose legacy still underpins Fijian land tenure and politics today.
The girmitiyas
To work the sugar plantations without disturbing Fijian land and labour, the British brought indentured workers from India between 1879 and 1916 — more than 60,000 people, known as girmitiyas after the "girmit", the agreement they signed. They endured harsh conditions on five-year contracts, and most stayed, building a community that by the twentieth century rivalled the Indigenous Fijians in number.
It is the same system of indenture that carried Indians to Natal, Mauritius, Trinidad and Guyana after the abolition of slavery — a global movement of coerced and contracted labour that reshaped societies from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean and East Africa. In Fiji it produced a lasting ethnic division that colonial rule did little to bridge, and that independence inherited whole.
Coups and republic
Fiji became independent in 1970. The unresolved tension between the two communities erupted in 1987, when an Indo-Fijian-supported government was overthrown in two military coups; Fiji left the Commonwealth and declared a republic. Further coups followed in 2000 and 2006, each deepening the quarrel over who the nation belonged to, and many Indo-Fijians emigrated.
A new constitution in 2013 and elections in 2014 restored civilian rule, and power has since changed hands peacefully. The economy leans on tourism, sugar and remittances, and Fiji has become a leading Pacific voice on climate change, its low-lying neighbours among the most exposed on earth to a rising sea.